


Runaway

by NervousAsexual



Series: Whumptober 2020 [30]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Aroflux Character, Aromantic Character, aroace character, but the whumptober prompt gave me an idea how to get from point a to point b, so i'm counting it, technically this was an already existing fic, today on nervousasexual pretends to know what the hell romantic attraction is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:15:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27304708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NervousAsexual/pseuds/NervousAsexual
Summary: A courser arrives at Acadia, unarmed and unaccompanied.
Relationships: Nick Valentine & X6-88
Series: Whumptober 2020 [30]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960987
Kudos: 7
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Runaway

**Author's Note:**

> Whumptober prompt #31--ignoring an injury  
> follows directly from "Reclamation"

The courser teleported into Acadia seven hours after the evacuation started. He was holding his hands up to show they were empty, but Chase was on him in seconds. Her knife was at his throat first and a flurry of pipe weapons, laser pistols, and 10mm guns were trained on him shortly after.

He didn't fight back, nor was he accompanied by the usual retinue of second generation synths. He only stood there, eyes hidden behind dark glasses, watching them watching him.

"What the hell do you want?" Chase growled.

"Valentine," the courser said evenly, failing to react as the knife pressed deeper into his skin. A single drop of blood rolled down the dark skin of his neck. "I want to talk to Valentine."

"The hell you will!"

"I have information he will want to know."

Chase scoffed. "Yeah, just like the last courser to see him. You want to talk to somebody, you talk to me."

"I have information about the Institute and I will only talk to Valentine."

"Let me put this another way," Chase told him. "Over my dead..."

"X6-88."

Chase and the courser both turned and there he was, leaning against the doorframe and watching what was happening with dull yellow eyes. The battered gen 2 frame was hidden by a ragged trenchcoat, exactly as it had been before.

"That's what you said your name was, isn't it?" Valentine said. "X6-88?"

"Valentine," Chase snapped. "What are you doing?"

Valentine gently raised a hand to shush her. "What's this information you have for me?"

"They've finished compiling the data," the courser said. "The first of the Institute forces will be here in less than an hour."

Valentine nodded slowly, tilting his head to rest against the doorframe. "Chase?"

She held the knife to the courser's throat a little longer, her jaw grinding beside his ear, then let it fall.

"I'll see what I can do," she said.

The courser remained motionless as she walked away. He watched Valentine from behind his sunglasses and said nothing.

"You heard him," Valentine said to the other synths. "You need to get out of here while you still can."

"What about you?" one of them asked.

Valentine just shrugged and shook his head.

The courser crossed the room in two swift strides and took Valentine by the wrist. Instantly the guns were trained on him again, and Valentine flinched, turning his face to the wall.

The courser remembered the synth in a stolen body, overwhelmed with sensation, struggling and sobbing and screaming as the Institute scientist cut memory drives from inside him. He released the skeletal wrist in his hand.

"You must be evacuated now," the courser told him. 

"They need the same thing." Valentine gestured to the other synths. "So does every other person in this place. Besides, don't they have everything I know already?"

The courser could only stare. "Your importance to this settlement..."

The synth shook his head. "The only reason I'm here is to be sure they get the chance to leave."

It wasn't what the courser expected. When he left the synth in that garage in Nahant, too weak to hold himself stable, he had expected the synth to return to his friends seeking comfort, the way a biological human would. Perhaps the last of his conviction that he was human had died with the generation three body he'd inhabited.

"You should go." Valentine closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. "They can track that chip in your head in seconds."

"I've taken care of it."

Valentine's eyes opened just a little, enough for the soft amber glow to become visible. Without a word he watched.

"I've been researching--the best place for you would be to the south of the Commonwealth. The Glowing Sea, I believe locals call it? High levels of radiation interfere with the Institute teleportation technology. They would need to travel on foot to reach you." Still Valentine didn't respond. "There has been an Institute defector living there for sometime. Not even coursers have been able to retrieve him. You would be safe there." 

Around them synths moved in all directions. Soon they would be scattered to the winds.

"I can take you to the edge of the Glowing Sea. It's only a simple relay."

Valentine nodded wearily to the synths around them. "Only if you take all of them."

To his surprise the courser felt a twinge of emotion--sadness? Disappointment? "That would require a significant amount of power. The Institute would be on you in minutes."

An early generation synth appeared in the doorway to the inner rooms. Without a second thought the courser angled his body between the two synths. Protect the target, he told himself. But the newest arrival didn't draw a weapon. When he looked closer the courser saw that it was battered and patched. The other prototype. It still functioned.

"Brother?" it asked softly. Unlike the one who called itself--himself--Valentine, this one's eyes were dark.

"DiMa," Valentine said. "This is the one I told you about."

The synth stepped closer, exposed metal bones clicking on the concrete. It examined the courser carefully and with none of the usual deference of a gen one synth.

"Greetings," it said at last. "You have my gratitude for allowing my brother to come home."

Remarkable, the courser thought. This prototype looked far less human than the other but appeared to consider itself just as human and possibly moreso.

"Chase tells me that we are running short on time." The synth came alongside them and laid a hand, little more than the metal structure of the fingers, on Valentine's shoulder. If it noticed how tightly Valentine closed his eyes at its touch it gave no sign. "Nick?"

Valentine nodded his head toward the courser. "This one's still got access to the Institute's relay. He said..." He squinted up at the courser. "The Glowing Sea. Institute can't relay there. He could take us all."

DiMa--the synth, the prototype, whatever he was--looked to the courser.

"I can, perhaps, but I won't." The courser can feel his own internal clock ticking down. They are running out of time. "I can mask my relays and carry perhaps one person with me. To relay a group would alert the Institute, and they will follow. Any advantage you have would be gone."

"If you'll only take one then take him," Valentine snapped. "The Institute already knows everything I do. The knowledge DiMa has is so much more in depth than mine."

"I've asked Faraday to hide the truly critical memories in data tapes," the prototype said softly. "And if pressed I've asked that he destroy them."

"Then take Faraday. Don't waste this opportunity on me."

For a moment the synth, its face expressionless, just looked at Valentine.

"Faraday is gone," it said at last. "Go to the Commonwealth. We will try to meet you there soon." When Valentine started to speak it added, "Please, don't argue. There is not enough time."

The courser reached out and closed a hand around the torn fabric of Valentine's sleeve. Beneath it the arm has been stripped of flesh and is little more than bone. "Stand close to me."

"Two could travel as easily as one." Valentine tried half-heartedly to pull his arm free. "Take both of us."

The synth backed away.

"Please." In this battered, limited body only Valentine's voice gave away his tears. "I... I just found you, DiMa. I'm not ready to lose you already."

The synth bowed his head. "Whatever happens will happen with or without us."

"Then why...?"

But they were out of time. The world warped around them, and the courser held on tightly. Through blurred vision he saw Valentine trying, too late, to reach out for the other synth, and the courser put an arm around him to hold him back. If he were to get lost in the stream of the relay...

Well. He wouldn't be lost. The courser would see to that.

They landed on uneven dirt, near enough to the glowing sea for the courser's internal geiger counter to start ticking. Valentine stumbled. Only the courser's hand on his arm kept him from falling.

"It's time to move," he told him. "If you are able to walk we should, but if needed I will carry you."

Valentine jerked away from him.

"Why are you doing this?" he demanded. "I told you to take DiMa. Goddammit." He began to pace. "If the Institute lays one finger on him I swear to you I..."

The courser was not surprised to find the synth is self-sacrificing. He has long had much more to give than a broken-down body from the Institute scrapheap. But this was, frankly, absurd. "You should be more concerned about the Institute laying a finger on you. They will not let you slip through their fingers again."

"Then let them take me." He stopped pacing and spread his arms. "There's nothing else they can do to me. They already know everything I know."

The courser didn't reply. Now, in this moment, the information was only secondary to the Institute's anger.

"There's nothing else I can do for them." The synth dropped his arms to his sides. "If having me would give the others a chance..."

"It wouldn't."

Valentine turned away. "You already saved me once. Why couldn't you save someone else this time?"

Behind dark glasses the courser stared at him. It was all very simple, and he couldn't understand why Valentine didn't see that. "I came for you."

"But why?"

"I do not understand."

"Why come back? Why save me at all?" Valentine folded his arms tightly around this battered body that was now his. "You clearly don't care about the other synths. So why are you doing this to me?"

'To' him? the courser thought. No. 'For' him. He did it because... He didn't know. The courser himself didn't fully understand why he was doing the things he was doing. "There isn't time for this. Walk with me, before the Institute can follow."

Valentine shook his head.

"I can't go with you," he whispered. "I have to get back."

This made no sense, none whatsoever. "You cannot do that."

"Why? Are you going to stop me?"

Not a week ago the courser had Valentine pinned against a wall, short of breath, too pained to struggle. "What I do is irrelevant. There are over three hundred miles between you and Acadia. It would take you a week to reach them, assuming the raiders or mutants don't kill you first."

As he looked out over the wasteland Valentine said nothing.

"Your loyalty is admirable but misguided."

Valentine hunched in on himself, shoulders curving inward in the only way the Institute's technology would allow. The courser closed the distance between them and after a moment's thought placed his hand carefully on the synth's shoulder. The full-body flinch that moved Valentine did not go unnoticed.

"I... am sorry," the courser told him. "I recognize that this is not what you want."

In return he received a sharp, bitter laugh. "That obvious, huh?"

"Yes. Please understand that teleporting more synths would only have further endangered them." Valentine said nothing. "We need to move. Are you able to walk on your own?"

Valentine jerked his shoulder out from under the courser's hand. He began to walk toward the Glowing Sea.

"Most would be grateful to have escaped the Institute," the courser said quietly.

"Most haven't died twice in the last week, have they."

In truth the courser had not thought of it that way. There had not been time to familiarize himself with Valentine's memories before leaving him in Nahant, but it was clear enough that something had happened to precipitate his move into the generation three body. Valentine had insisted that he had not wanted the body, so it seemed safe to assume that he was forced to make the switch when his old body became uninhabitable.

He had also failed to think of the synth's reclamation process as a kind of death, but upon reflection he recognized it was so. Valentine had been brought to the Institute alert, with full knowledge of what was happening to him. By the end of it the stolen body had been once again an empty shell.

"You got enough rad-x for this?" Valentine asked, pulling the courser from his thoughts.

"Unnecessary. I may appear human but radiation affects me the same way it affects you."

Valentine rubbed his arms through the coat. "Makes my bones ache."

"Really." This too was unexpected. A second generation synth should be unaffected by radiation; there had never been any indication that the gen-IIs back in the Institute... But the Institute had hardly been asking the synths how they felt, had they. "I didn't know. Will you be able to tolerate the radiation here?"

Valentine paused, glanced over his shoulder at the courser. His eyes were no different from those of any other second generation synth. Still the courser sensed there was something to be read there. "You'd be surprised at the things I can tolerate."

They walked for two hours. By the final stretch Valentine's gait had acquired a limp, one the courser assumed came from the rusted skeleton of this new body. He stumbled over every pothole, and every so often he paused to lean against one of the downed trees alongside the road. He still refused assistance from the courser.

"We're out of teleport range," the courser told him. "It is safe to stop." He scanned their surroundings and chose a half-buried Red Rocket building as their waystation. He moved himself to herd Valentine toward it. "I would like to take a look at your leg when we are out of the open. I may be able to..."

Valentine walked ahead of him into the garage and leaned silently against the wall. He did not look over.

"If you won't allow me to help you then at least take this." He located an oil canister on the shelves and attempted to give it to Valentine, but it fell from his hands to the gritty floor. "I apologize for the condition of this body. I chose a frame that would not be missed and did not have time to repair it."

"It's just a body. Not much difference between one and the other."

His ambivalence was unusual but not unexpected. The courser wondered if the other prototype felt the same way. His body was in much worse shape than even this one. He considered asking, but a distinctive rumble beneath the ground stopped him short. "Do you have a weapon," he asked.

"What? A..." The courser looked at him sharply and he cut off that line of thinking. He drew a handgun from inside his coat. The courser looked it over; it was a pipe revolver, rather than a pistol, but it still lacked the stopping power needed here in the wastes.

"Stay behind me," he warned the synth. Valentine opened his mouth as if to question but stopped short. Even in his damaged body he must have felt the approach. The courser drew his laser rifle and stepped back into the wasteland just as the radscorpion surfaced.

He led it away from the garage, keeping his distance and hitting it in the head with laser fire to disorient it. It followed, but it moved much faster than he could over the debris. Every sense in the courser's body was on alert. From the corner of his eye he picked a path through the petrified trees downed nearby. A deafening crack echoed from the garage and the radscorpion stumbled; Valentine had gotten a shot into one of its legs, fracturing the exoskeleton, and the courser put a few more into that leg before lowering his weapon to sprint over the trees.

He could hear the radscorpion still coming, legs clacking over rocks and trees as easily as dirt, and another shot from Valentine that barely staggered it. It stabbed its tail at his back. He dove and rolled to one side and poured more laser fire into its legs. If any of the shots made it past and struck its belly it gave no indication. Instead it swung itself around, claws swinging perilously close to the courser's head, and kept moving. The courser dodged, and dodged again, and Valentine put another shot into the claw that came at him and three more into the dirt behind them.

Here the courser made his mistake. He looked back.

Valentine missing his shots should not have worried him. He had not been in this body more than a day and was still struggling to walk; there was no reason to expect expert marksmanship from him. But somehow the courser did, and he worried, and he glanced back, certain that he would see a deathclaw tearing the synth apart.

He saw nothing of the kind. He saw Valentine reloading his gun, and then he saw the tail coming at him.

It ripped his side open, and he reprimanded himself for making such an unbelievably human error. But he rolled with it, hooked an arm around the tail itself and climbed directly onto its back. He stomped on the creature's head, once, twice, and a third strike split the exoskeleton. He let go of the tail and emptied every fusion cell he had into the thing's skull.

It stabbed at him one last time and staggered forward before it collapsed.

Without a moment's pause the courser shoved off it and ran to the garage. Valentine was leaning against the wall again. He looked unharmed, but he needed to be sure. "Are you hurt?" he demanded.

"Me?" Valentine asked. "Of course not. I'm not the one going head-to-head with a radscorpion."

A nice thought, but also entirely something the synth would say regardless. The courser came to stand near him and looked him over for injuries.

"What are you doing? I told you I'm... Damn, he got you good, didn't he?"

Those soft amber eyes were focused on his side. The courser yanked his coat closed over the wound. "Irrelevant."

"It doesn't look irrelevant." Valentine patted at his pockets, dug through one and pulled out a stimpack. "Here."

"I don't need that. You need to save it for yourself."

"You say that, but you're the one who's bleeding." The synth pushed it at him, just as he'd pushed the oil at him. The gesture should not have been a surprise either, and yet... "Either you stick yourself with it or I'll stick you myself." The courser shook his head. Valentine just shrugged and stabbed the stim into the courser's upper arm. "Don't give me that look. I warned you, didn't I?"

He should have known he would do something like this. The courser, starting to come down from the adrenaline of the fight, could feel the wound in his side healing itself. It felt surprisingly good.

"There you go." Valentine took the empty stim back and laid it on a nearby diagnostics bench. For the first time his body looked as if it was beginning to relax. His shoulders were no longer stiff, and he moved more easily. Even his limp seemed to have lost some of its intensity. "Hope that helps."

It did. The courser gave him a single nod.

Something like a smile played out on the usually expressionless second generation body. Fascinating, he thought. The smile brought out something warm and almost soft inside him. For a moment he'd wanted little more than to ensure that smile stayed there as long as possible.

That seemed a tall order. The courser was talented at many things, but he had not been created for anyone's pleasure and after everything he had put Valentine through he was impressed that his presence was even tolerated.

"Feelin' okay?" Valentine asked him. "Look, let's sit down. Catch our breath before we get moving."

The courser had to admit that was a sound idea. He too leaned against the garage wall and slid down to sit on the cold hard concrete. Valentine closed his eyes and slid down next to him, groaning as his body began to fold. Somehow the sound reminded the courser of the reclamation process he'd put him through and, simultaneously, of the begrudging chuckle of Institute scientists telling themselves jokes.

"Thank you," the courser said. "For the stimpack."

Valentine didn't open his eyes. "Anytime," he said softly.

"It was unnecessary. I heal quickly. I'm not..." He hesitated. "I am not human."

Valentine laughed. "More human than I am."

Perhaps this was true. The courser was beginning to realize just how well the Institute had programmed his emotions.

They sat together for a while. Somewhere in the darkness a feral howled in despair.

"I have to ask," Valentine said at last. His speech was low, an incredibly light touch. "Why?"

The courser only looked at him.

"I don't understand why you're doing this. After the Institute, the reclaiming, all that, what is it you get out of this?"

A very good question. The courser did not know the answer. "I get the knowledge that you are safe."

Valentine shook his head. "But I'm no one to you. I can't be the first synth you've ever... Why do you care what happens to me?"

The courser thought for a moment, but his thoughts were as tangled as they'd ever been. "You were kind to me." Valentine audibly blinked, just the tiniest click of internal mechanics. The courser forced himself to keep going. "Despite everything, you acted as if I were... human, I suppose." He tried not to think of the synth's eyes when the scientist had cut the memory chips out of him. Nine times in ten synths were belligerent or disgusted by him or panicked by his mere presence. But this one had actually looked at him, eye to eye, and acted as if the courser could give him some kind of sympathy, like he legitimately thought he could offer comfort and advice. And later, when it was all over, he'd asked his name, as if less than twelve hours before the courser hadn't delivered him to the people who systematically dismantled him.

_They don't own you,_ he'd said. _You don't belong to anybody but yourself._

Quietly Valentine said, "You don't think the others at Arcadia would have been kind to you, if you gave them the chance?"

The courser had his doubts but Valentine had a point. And yet he found he couldn't bring himself to care about the others. Valentine was the one he wanted to help, Valentine with his foolish self-sacrificing nature and his smart mouth and his warm synthetic heart. "They... I..." His chest ached. He rubbed at it, growing a bit concerned. "I think I am having a heart attack."

"I think you're just experiencing feelings."

"It's uncomfortable. I hate it."

Valentine laughed. "Sometimes that is how it goes." He sighed and leaned back against the wall. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"About what? I am still unclear on what's happening. It's like... it's like there's a hole in my chest. And it gets bigger all the time."

"Maybe you're homesick."

The courser scoffed. "I have spent most of my existence in the Commonwealth. The Institute is not home. This is... it feels positive. It hurts and I hate it, but it doesn't feel wrong." He glanced over to see Valentine looking at him intently. "What?"

"Nothing. I'm just thinking."

"It has nothing to do with the Institute. The feeling isn't any stronger or weaker when I think about them. It's primarily centered on..." He paused, suddenly self-conscious. "...it only gets stronger when I think about you."

Valentine sighed. "Kid, I..."

"Let me finish. I'm sure I am malfunctioning in some way. This is not an emotion the Institute would want me to feel. But every time I look at you I think that I would enjoy being in your company, if things were different." He could recognize one of the emotions bubbling up inside him--fear. "I think that I would like to..." He looked down at his hands, opening and closing them in his lap. "I think that I would like to hold you, if that makes sense."

Valentine pressed his own hands to his face, rubbing at his eyes.

"I know that is inappropriate. I have held you, in other ways, and all of them have been painful for you. But I also feel that you have a right to know.

"Thank you for telling me." The courser couldn't bring himself to look at him any longer. "I know that can't have been easy for you."

The courser pressed a hand into his side. The radscorpion strike was all but healed.

"And you're not... You're not malfunctioning, X6. I think you're experiencing something you haven't before, but it doesn't make you broken. My brother's friend, Faraday, the one I asked you to take, he has something similar that he feels toward DiMa, and DiMa feels something similar toward him."

Without realizing it the courser held his breath.

"It's... They love each other. You know?"

The courser was all but vibrating with nervous energy. That couldn't be possible. For the prototype and his companion, perhaps, but not for himself. The feeling was so foreign, and if he were capable of love would he not have experienced it long before this?

But at the same time he thought of the prototype and its--his--loyal third generation companion. He knew very little of them, had not had time to dig in depth into Valentine's memories in the Institute, but he was correct. The relationship between those two, DiMa and Faraday, as Valentine called them, made his chest hurt even more. For the first time in his life the courser found himself wanting something. He wanted to spend the rest of his life caring for the prototype synth that had come into his life. He wanted to be able to sit somewhere, calmly and happily, and just exist with Valentine. That was a foolish thing to want after all that he'd done. He ought to have known better.

"And if that's what you feel toward me, then I'm... honored, for lack of a better word, but kid, there's people out there you haven't even met yet that you'll love even more."

"With all due respect, I doubt my feelings for them could be as intense as my feelings toward you."

"Everyone says that. Especially with their first. But it's never the truth."

"But..."

"Look. I'm never going to feel the same way toward you."

"I wouldn't expect after all that I've done..."

"Even if things were different." Valentine folded his arms and shifted uncomfortably. "Even if you were someone else entirely. I'm just not capable of it."

"If there is something broken, we can find a way to fix it."

"Nothing's broken. It's just the way I am. At first I thought it might be the body, if you know what I mean, but it was exactly the same in the gen three body, and DiMa still feels it in his original body. I'm just not wired that way."

The courser couldn't find an adequate response.

"I appreciate that you think you're helping me, but I'm not whatever it is you want me to be. I'm myself. That's all. It's more than enough."

Stupid, the courser thought. Foolish. Thinking he was worth even passing kindness on Valentine's part.

"There will be others. You'll find someone you like better than you like me."

Impossible.

"It'll be alright, kid. Trust me on this one."

"It isn't working."

Valentine looked at him, confused.

"I'm trying to believe you. But nothing has changed. I still want... I'd still like to hold you. Even if you don't feel the same about me."

"I'm not going to lead you on like there'll be some miraculous change and I'll suddenly be able to give you what you want."

"I understand. But it would still be good to do something that would give you a little comfort after all this."

Somehow Valentine's eyes looked sad, and tired, and hurt.

"When I left you in Nahant--you held onto me. I couldn't stay then, but if it would still make you feel better I can do it now."

"I..." Valentine slouched in on himself. "I wasn't thinking straight. Everything hurt, and I was scared."

"Are you still scared?"

Valentine met his eyes. "Yeah."

The courser swallowed his fear, moved closer, and held out an arm.

"You're stubborn, I'll give you that." But despite his words Valentine smiled, and he let himself lean against the courser's shoulder.

The courser settled an arm around him. His chest still hurt. He found he didn't mind as much as he'd thought.


End file.
